scholarly journals K.S. Maniam’s Bestiary: Reading Animality and Identity in Selected Stories

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-188
Author(s):  
Agnes S. K. Yeow
Keyword(s):  
National Belonging ◽  
Diasporic Identity

This essay scrutinises K.S.Maniam’s fictional animals by going beyond the confines of metaphor to interrogate the concept of animality and how animality impinges on diasporic identity. I examine the writer’s impulse to animalise the notion of national belonging especially though thestrategic deployment of the animal mask which reveals the shared domination of migrant and animal. I argue that Maniam’s critique of animality not only suggests that migrant and animal lives are interlinked but also informs his re-envisioning of the diasporic self. I positthat Maniam’s “new diaspora”advances the notion of diasporic self as ‘becoming-animal.’

Challenging the Color-Blind American Dream: Transnational Adoption in A Gesture Life, The Love Wife, and Digging to America

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 109-133
Author(s):  
Pirjo Ahokas
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Transracial Adoption ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Identity Constructions ◽  
Diasporic Identity ◽  
Color Blind

In historical terms the culture-specific notion of “the American Dream” has excluded racialized groups of people. However, the rise of postethnic and color-blind thinking in the past few decades implies that ethnic and racial equality has already been realized in the United States where people are free to choose their ethnic identities. Adoption as a literary trope is regarded as important because it allows authors to speak of broader questions about identity and belonging. This study focuses on transnational and transracial adoption in three novels: Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999), Gish Jen’s The Love Wife (2004), and Ann Tyler’s Digging to America (2006). These novels link adoption to the realization of one of the updated versions of the American Dream. I call it the Color-Blind American Dream, because it is pursued through denial of racial difference. As the adopting families in the three novels differ from one another, I examine the depth of their faithfulness to notions of race transcendence—and if the novels in question ultimately challenge the Color-Blind American Dream. In a white-dominated society, Asian immigrants and adoptees of Asian descent are socialized to identify with idealized whiteness, but experiences of racism inescapably draw attention to their visible difference. At the turn of the 21st century, there was a shift in Asian American studies to transnationalism and diasporic identity constructions as well as psychoanalytic criticism. In my essay, I apply the psychoanalytic concepts of “racial melancholia” and “racial reparation,” which have been developed by Asian American scholars. Since the three novels, which all tackle transnational and transracial adoption, invest in the Color Blind- American Dream, these theoretical concepts are helpful in questioning what is being repressed in adhering to a postethnic and color-blind refusal to engage history and how this affects identity and sense of national belonging.

Black in English: Race, Migration, and National Belonging in Postcolonial Italy

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorgia García-Peña
Keyword(s):  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Transnational Networks ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Cultural Texts

Building on the growing body of scholarship on comparative race and ethnicity, this article considers how immigrants of color and their descendants interpret, translate, and deploy politicized ethno-racial terms (Black, Latinx) to confront racism in contemporary Italy. Through the analysis of cultural texts, including interviews, speeches, and a novel, I argue that terms, ideologies, and racial processes have become both local and global as immigrants and new citizens build transnational networks of contestation from which to confront the violence of coloniality and exploitation that led them to migrate while asserting belonging in the nations in which they reside. 

The Extended Nation as a Political Project – Hungarian Diaspora Living in Western Canada

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-103
Author(s):  
Ágnes Vass
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Western Canada ◽  
Legislative Elections ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
State Budget ◽  
External Voting ◽  
Diaspora Policy

AbstractPolicy towards Hungarians living in neighbouring countries has been a central issue for Hungarian governments, yet Hungarian diaspora living mainly in Western Europe and North America have received very little attention. This has changed after the 2010 landslide victory of Fidesz. The new government introduced a structured policy focused on engaging Hungarian diaspora, largely due to the nationalist rhetoric of the governing party. The article argues that this change reflects a turn of Hungarian nationalism into what Ragazzi and Balalowska (2011) have called post-territorial nationalism, where national belonging becomes disconnected from territory. It is because of this new conception of Hungarian nationalism that we witness the Hungarian government approach Hungarian communities living in other countries in new ways while using new policy tools: the offer of extraterritorial citizenship; political campaigns to motivate the diaspora to take part in Hungarian domestic politics by voting in legislative elections; or the never-before-seen high state budget allocated to support these communities. Our analysis is based on qualitative data gathered in 2016 from focus group discussions conducted in the Hungarian community of Western Canada to understand the effects of this diaspora politics from a bottom-up perspective. Using the theoretical framework of extraterritorial citizenship, external voting rights and diaspora engagement programmes, the paper gives a brief overview of the development of the Hungarian diaspora policy. We focus on how post-territorial nationalism of the Hungarian government after 2010 effects the ties of Hungarian communities in Canada with Hungary, how the members of these communities conceptualise the meaning of their “new” Hungarian citizenship, voting rights and other diaspora programmes. We argue that external citizenship and voting rights play a crucial role in the Orbán government’s attempt to govern Hungarian diaspora communities through diaspora policy.

Fat as a Floating Signifier

2019 ◽  
pp. 143-163
Author(s):  
Sabrina Strings
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Irish Women ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
Fat Phobia ◽  
Fat Stigma

Studies on the development of fat stigma in the United States often consider gender, but not race. This chapter adds to the literature on the significance of race in the propagation of fat phobia. I investigate representations of voluptuousness among “white” Anglo-Saxon and German women, as well as “black” Irish women between 1830 and 1890—a time period during which the value of a curvy physique was hotly contested—performing a discourse analysis of thirty-three articles from top newspapers and magazines. I found that the rounded forms of Anglo-Saxon and German women were generally praised as signs of health and beauty. The fat Irish, by contrast, were depicted as grotesque. Building on the work of Stuart Hall, I conclude that fat was a “floating signifier” of race and national belonging. That is, rather than being universally lauded or condemned, the value attached to fatness was related to the race of its possessor.

scholarly journals Engineering care in pandemic technogovernance: The politics of care in China and South Korea’s COVID-19 tracking apps

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110207
Author(s):  
Youngrim Kim ◽  
Yuchen Chen ◽  
Fan Liang
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Surveillance Studies ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Care Services ◽  
Ideological Dimension ◽  
And Control

This article critically examines South Korea and China’s COVID-19 tracking apps by bridging surveillance studies with feminist technoscience’s understanding of the “politics of care”. Conducting critical readings of the apps and textual analysis of discursive materials, we demonstrate how the ideological, relational, and material practices of the apps strategically deployed “care” to normalize a particular form of pandemic technogovernance in these two countries. In the ideological dimension, media and state discourse utilized a combination of vilifying and nationalist rhetoric that framed one’s acquiescence to surveillance as a demonstration of national belonging. Meanwhile, the apps also performed ambivalent roles in facilitating essential care services and mobilizing self-tracking activities, which contributed to the manufacturing of pseudonormality in these societies. In the end, we argue that the Chinese and South Korean governments managed to frame their aggressive surveillance infrastructure during COVID-19 as a form of paternalistic care by finessing the blurred boundaries between care and control.

scholarly journals Governing Nonconformity: Gender Presentation, Public Space, and the City in New Order Indonesia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hegarty
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Gender Nonconformity ◽  
The Body ◽  
New Order ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Gender Presentation ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

The regulation of public space is generative of new approaches to gender nonconformity. In 1968 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, a group of people who identified as wadam—a new term made by combining parts of Indonesian words denoting “femininity” and “masculinity”—made a claim to the city's governor that they had the right to appear in public space. This article illustrates the paradoxical achievement of obtaining recognition on terms constituted through public nuisance regulations governing access to and movement through space. The origins and diffuse effects of recognition achieved by those who identified as wadam and, a decade later, waria facilitated the partial recognition of a status that was legal but nonconforming. This possibility emerged out of city-level innovations and historical conceptualizations of the body in Indonesia. Attending to the way that gender nonconformity was folded into existing methods of codifying space at the scale of the city reflects a broader anxiety over who can enter public space and on what basis. Considering a concern for struggles to contend with nonconformity on spatial grounds at the level of the city encourages an alternative perspective on the emergence of gender and sexual morality as a definitive feature of national belonging in Indonesia and elsewhere.

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